1917?                                                                                                                  #240

By Hank Silverberg 

For a few hours this past week, I started searching the web and some of my history textbooks looking for details on the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. That was the last time anyone inside Russia challenged one of its totalitarian rulers.

It came in the midst of World War One when Russia was losing badly, and its economy was falling apart. 

The Russians withdrew from the war and spent the next five years with factions fighting each other. The end result was the Soviet Union, Stalin's mass murder purges, his pact with Hitler where they got betrayed, Stalingrad and eventually the Cold War. You can check the specific historical details on the web if you don't already know them.  

This time around, the little military threat to Putin from Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was interesting, but it did not result in a regime change, at least not yet.   

I will leave all the ramifications to the Russia experts. And there seems to be a lot of them. 

I want to focus on two items. 

First, the question one should always ask when there is instability in Eastern Europe. Who controls the nukes? 

In this case it appears Putin never lost control of the government and the nuclear launch code buttons.  Despite his illegal and despicable invasion of Ukraine, that's a good thing. The people who were challenging him are not exactly nice guys. They are mercenaries who will fight for the highest bidder, and in fact may be worse. Many of them have fascist ideology and no moral code.  

So, the little one-day coup attempt may be a good thing because both sides lost. Prigozhin got nothing but a new home in exile in Belarus (any maybe some payoff money) and Putin now looks a lot weaker to his own people and everyone else. 

The other thing that was interesting to watch was the reaction to it all in the United States. 

Those in the know--like the folks inside the CIA and the White House, said, let's wait and see what is actually happening? They are aware that instability in the Russian government could lead to a wider war in Ukraine and bigger trouble for Europe as a whole. 

Those who don't know--like a good number of conservative pundits and their political lemmings, were all worried about poor Vladimir Putin who may still lose his job. Why they were worried about him is not clear.  They didn't express any concern about the nuclear weapons. They just seem to like Vladimir. Remember, he's technically not a communist anymore. Just an "authoritarian leader". 

The only bad news in all of this is that Ukraine has not taken advantage of the disruption on the battlefield and launched that major counteroffensive we've been hearing about. That may be NATO's fault. The allied nations haven't been quick enough in providing fighter jets Ukraine need for such an assault. 

As we always say in this type of news, stay tuned.   

Apologies to Foghorn Leghorn!

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? We finally have an answer: it's neither. 

Humans have messed with the food chain and what we eat over time. We all know those "scallops" on your plate are really a variety of sea life, including shark's cheeks. The "veggie burger" has been around for some time, and there was even a fad a while back for "Beefallo," a hybrid of a buffalo and a longhorn steer. 

But in those cases, the food actually came from either a plant or an animal. 

Now comes word that the USDA has approved the sale of "Cultivated Meats" in the U.S.  That means you can now get poultry produced by growing cells extracted from an animal's body, in this case a chicken. To clarify, it's grown directly from the animal's cells, no eggs involved. A company called "GOOD Meat and Eat Just" is manufacturing it. It the U.S. it will be produced by "UPSIDE Food". 

Supposedly the food tastes very similar to chicken breast and is made from 99% chicken cells. It is grown in stainless steel tanks at a company in California in a facility that looks very much like a brewery. The facility can produce 50,000 pounds of the meat in a year. 

The USDA says it's safe for human consumption, and several restaurants have already signed on to use it. 

Not sure you like the idea? You had better get used to it. There are more than 150 companies producing "cultivated" meat and seafood.

Before you say "ewww," remember all those stories about how most chickens are raised? They often come from crowded, dirty coops and are sometimes injected with antibiotics to keep them healthy. That drug is then passed on to you.  

I wonder what the shelf life is on cultivated food?

One COMPANY One Vote?

It's a basic premise of American democracy--one person, one vote. Unless of course, you live in Seaford, Delaware.

The town of about 8,000 people is about to do something that could turn the country upside down. The Seaford Council wants to amend its charter to give businesses, including LLC's, corporations, trusts and partnerships the right to VOTE in local elections. 

It is an outrageous concept of course, especially in Delaware, a very small state where 1.8 million businesses are registered to operate, but where only 989,948 people actually live.  (Source: 2020 census.)

The state legislature would have to approve such a provision, and it faces stiff opposition from many groups, for obvious reasons. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seaford-delaware-corporate-voting-llc-trust-elections/

But those proposing see it as a way to fix low voter turnout in municipal elections and a way to attract business owners to the community. 

A handful of other small towns in the state already allow corporations to vote. But in 2019, a single property manager who controlled many LLCs, was allowed to vote 31 times in Newark, and the law there was modified a bit as a result.  

Delaware is known for its favorable business climate that allows owners to stay anonymous and exempts many businesses from paying corporate income tax. 

CBS MoneyWatch tried to get a comment from the House Speaker in Delaware, but he dodged an answer. At a hearing, Speaker Peter Schwartzkopf said, "I don't think it's a good idea. But I don't think I want to vote to stop it."

There is a bill in the hopper in the state legislature that would bar such corporate voting in local elections altogether. 

I would suggest that the whole concept is unconstitutional, but then again, there was that decision in Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission in the U.S. Supreme Court ten years ago, that allowed corporations to donate as much money as they wanted to political campaigns basically treating corporations like an average citizen. 

This decision in a small Delaware town looks like a canary in a coal mine. It could signal a very dramatic shift in power away from the average voter.

Power Drain

While we are on the subject of power shifts, we should also take a look at a new report on gender equity around the world. The report looks at equity between men and women on everything from economic activity to physical well-being and has done so for the last 17 years in 146 countries.  Here's the headline. The United States fell from 27th down to 43rd in 2023. That's just beneath Columbia and just above Luxembourg.

That drop can be attributed to a widening gap between men and women in political empowerment including things like the share of women holding positions in the federal, state and local governments. And the U.S. also faces a growing general divide in life expectancy. Over the last decade in the United States, women's life expectancy has dropped five years while men's dropped three years. 

There is some good news here, though. The gap on pay parity has been narrowed over the last several years. 

It should be noted that no country had complete parity. Iceland, which has ranked first for the last four years, has closed 91% of the gap between men and woman. Norway, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand were also in the top five. 

On the bottom were Afghanistan, Chad, Algeria, Pakistan and Iran. 

(You can see the full report here: https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2023/digest

Dumbest Quote of The Week! 

Every time there is some kind of disaster, the first thing a number of Republicans do is try to blame it on President Biden or his administration, often before any of the facts are known. When a tanker truck turned over and caused a fire that burned up part of I-95 in Philadelphia, a number of right- wingers went after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, trying to make the accident and subsequent highway collapse his fault. It was nonsense, of course. And there was no credit to the Administration when the highway, a major link for commerce in the Northeast, reopened very quickly this week after Buttigieg and Biden made it a priority. 

Which brings us to the tragic story of the Titan, that submersible that appears to have imploded thousands of feet below the ocean, killing the five people on board. You have probably seen and heard a great deal on this incident, so I won't repeat it here. But it did produce this week's dumbest quote. It came from Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas. He was quick to criticize the response to the tragedy, blaming it on Biden. Here is what he said:

"What appears to be the case is epic failure in leadership. Where exactly that leadership failure is, not sure, is it the White House, the Coast Guard, the Navy? I'm not sure." 

It was a dumb comment for more reasons than one.  Ocean Gate is an American company, but the Titan was launched from a Canadian research vessel, meaning Canada was the first to respond. The U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy joined the rescue operation almost right away. It was a search in international waters about 400 miles off the coast of

(Titanic wreckage, courtesy historythings.com) 

Newfoundland near the Titanic wreckage. And of course, now we know the submersible imploded only a short time after it was launched, so the response time was irrelevant. Crenshaw's comments are a perfect example of the knee-jerk reaction by irresponsible politicians always trying to twist the facts for their advantage. 

(Your comments and suggestions for this blog are welcome, see comment section below)  

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